Discuss the questions preceding the reading. "Aftermath and Liberation"

Question: What do you think are four of the main points in the reading
“Aftermath and Liberation”?

Suggested Answers: Several points from this reading might be stressed.

The Allies liberated different camps in different ways. The Russians,
hurrying to get to Berlin, entered Auschwitz and then moved on. They enlisted
those who wanted or were able to fight and sent others either to hospitals
or further into Russia.

The British and American troops were completely unprepared for what they
found in the camps. As the quoted liberator says: “It simply boggles the
mind.”

The Germans continued the murder of the Jews until the last possible
moment. Jews were forced to march from Auschwitz and other Polish camps
to concentration camps inside Germany. These forced marches became known
as the Death Marches. From a military or practical point of view, the
Death Marches made no sense. Thousands of Jews died during the marches
– they froze, starved or were shot to death.

Still in the midst of the war, the liberators could only treat the victims
quickly and in ways that reminded them of how they had been treated when
they first arrived as prisoners of the Germans.

The ordeals of the Holocaust were not over after the camps were liberated,
DP camps, while nothing like concentration or death camps, were nevertheless,
unpleasant. Many who returned to their homes found they were not wanted
and were subjected to violence at the hands of their former neighbors.

The remnants of European Jewry returned from concentration, labor and
death camps or from hiding to discover that their families, their way
of life, their institutions, their traditions, their culture, all had
been destroyed. The comment from the survivor is a typical one: “What
was there to live for?” Survivors were faced with the frightening task of
starting “new lives” because the continuity of their lives was gone. To
start over, now without parents or siblings, without communities or leaders,
seemed to be an overwhelming task. Could they reconstruct their religious
and social traditions, their culture, from scratch? Would they be able
to do those things in strange lands?

Questions for Reading 17A

Do you think justice was achieved by the Nuremberg Trials? Should
there have been other defendants? Suggestions for discussion:
There have been those beginning with Goering but including some anti-Nazi
legal scholars, who have argued that the trials were conducted by the
victors and therefore lost their moral power. Goering insisted that he
be tried on the basis of German laws of the 1930s. Some legal scholars
wish that the Allies had searched for neutral judges – those who had not
been involved with the war such as people from Switzerland or Sweden.
Given the vast involvement of European bureaucrats, professionals, laborers,
clergymen, etc. that this curriculum has discussed, it might have made
more sense to indict organizations like medical associations, the German
travel agencies and even the railways. In 1945 and 1946, those who were
preparing the trials were not aware of the nature of the destruction process,
or they were overwhelmed by the prospect of having to indict tens of thousands
of people.

Do you agree with Chief Justice Jackson’s statements about not interfering
in the laws and practices of other governments?Suggestions for
discussion: The Nuremberg trials upheld the view that each country’s
laws and internal affairs must be respected above any other consideration.
Only where Germans interfered with other countries or where they imprisoned,
enslaved or killed foreign nationals who were brought into Germany, like
Polish slave laborers, were they found guilty. Thus, anti-Jewish laws
passed against German Jews from 1933 to 1944 were not subject to the trials;
imprisonment of German Jews in German concentration camps were not subject
to the trials; deportations of German Jews were not subject the trials.
If the International Tribunal had decided that German laws in Germany
were subject to their judgment, that would have opened up the possibility
of any country interfering in the affairs of another country simply because
they found it unjust or in some other way offensive. It would have set
a dangerous precedent of interference, allowing legal intervention on
the basis of Nuremberg Trials.

Should there have been a separate category for crimes committed against
the Jews?Suggestions for discussion: Only the Jews were killed
as Jews; they were not killed because they were members of a national
group, a military or political opponent. Only the Jews were to be completely
annihilated – at least up to 1945. There were plans already being carried
out in 1934 and 1944 for the similar murder of Poles, and the same policy
was followed against the Gypsies. If the purpose of the Nuremberg Trails
was to see justice done, it might have been made more sense to create
a separate category called “crimes against the Jews,” or, as one historian
has written, “crimes against the human status perpetrated on the body
of the Jews.”